How To Make An Apology

You're Not Wrong, Elton

Christian’s 'Shattered. Gutted. Heartbroken' sounded uncomfortably like someone working his way through a list of adjectives and hoping that he’d alight on the right one

"Sorry," said Elton John in 1976 , "Seems to be the hardest word." In Elt’s defence, the ‘refreshed’ state in which he spent most of the seventies probably meant that getting a coherent sentence of any kind out was often difficult. But he’d have sympathised with those dominating the news agenda this week.

The modern equivalent of a pitchfork-wielding mob formed around Mel Greig and Michael Christian, the hapless DJs with Australia’s 2DayFM, whose teeth-grindingly unfunny prank call (is there any other kind?) to Kate Middleton’s hospital bed appeared to have contributed to the suicide of nurse Jacinta Saldanha who took their call. Whether or not it did is extremely unclear at the time of writing, but the pair were still expected to front up to the cameras. Greig gave the more sympathetic performance of the two, while Christian’s "Shattered. Gutted. Heartbroken" sounded uncomfortably like someone working his way through a list of adjectives and hoping that he’d alight on the right one. Their combined showing did little to win anyone over; with the pair currently off air and advertisers cancelling their slots on the station, on this occasion apologising simply wasn’t enough.

Also this week, Starbucks took out full-page adverts across the press to deliver an open letter from their UK managing director Kris Engskov. This was in response to public anger at an omnipresent company apparently pulling a number of legal accountancy stunts to get their corporation tax level down to (let’s phrase this carefully) "somewhat less than you might expect". £8.6m over 14 years and nothing in the last three years despite UK sales of nearly £400m last year alone, to be precise. This has been a political hot potato ever since April when chancellor George Osbourne declared himself "shocked" to discover that some of the country’s wealthiest people legally pay no income tax.

Having already got a bit defensive halfway through the first line (‘We’re taking action to pay corporation tax in the UK — above what is currently required by tax law’) Engskov then embarked on the kind of odyssey of disingenuous managerial bollocks that companies always fall prey to the minute they start trying to sound like approachable human entities. "The fact remains," he wrote humbly, ‘Starbucks has found making a profit in the UK to be difficult." Right. That’s why you never really see anyone drinking their stuff. Or why you were probably under the impression that they’d closed down completely years ago, like C&A or Zaavi. Or why you never suddenly notice that three branches appear to have opened on every high street in the country. It doesn’t help Engskov’s case that after last week’s Autumn Statement people are even less in the mood to listen to rich people bleat about how ‘we hope that over time…you will give us an opportunity to build on your trust.’ And it really doesn’t help his case that ever since South Park spoofed BP’s apology for polluting the Gulf of Mexico, it’s impossible to take this kind of hand-wringing, weapons-grade, corporate horseshit without picturing the speaker lying buck naked on a bearskin rug as he talks to you.

Ironically, the most commendable example of the week came from a public figure who refused point blank to apologise for anything or backtrack an inch, despite coming under more pressure than anyone to do so. MP Naomi Long of Northern Ireland’s Alliance Party went on Radio 4’s World Tonight on Monday hours after an unmarked police car was petrol bombed by a Loyalist gang as it stood guard outside her constituency office (the party are blamed by Loyalists for tipping the vote against them over whether a Union flag should be displayed at Belfast City Hall all year round, or only on special occasions). Host Ritula Shah asked Long if she had any sympathy with the viewpoint that a community saw its symbols being eroded, at which point Long – her voice shaking with rage – unloaded. "There can be no buts, there can be no ifs, there can be no equivocation… It cannot be allowed that you have violence simply because you disagree with the actions of a democratically elected body… We will not be intimidated and we will not be moved, because if we change our minds on this situation then democracy is lost and that is too high a price to pay."

Long has received serious death threats and her office is now under police guard. Proof that apologising isn’t always the decent thing to do, and that if anyone ever trots out the line about ‘all politicians being as bad as each other’ they’re talking out of the back of their neck.